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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

> But on the whole I don't really remember the web being slower or less usable than it is now

We have very different memories then. I very clearly remember everything but very simple html taking forever to transfer over 56k connection

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Same here. I have very clear memories of dismissing the WWW as useless for exactly this reason. Those memories are 30 years old so they may not be entirely accurate, but the principle of embarrassment [1] lends them some support if you buy into that sort of thing.

[1] https://cafn.us/2010/12/10/terminology-principle-of-embarras...

I don't know about you guys but I got a hell of a lot done on a 56K modem all the way up until the mid-2000s. Hell, I was even doing group content on City of Heroes from the dial-up connection I had while working my night-shift hotel job, and the game played surprisingly well given the bandwidth and latencies I had.

I just turned off image loading by default and would right click and select load image.

Generally pages loaded great.

Ha, me too, I turned off images back then and it made everything snappy and very pleasant. I just wanted the text, the information.

It’s weird though- people want all the nonsense. More and more that is the primary use of the web.

you guys should try and dig up some old home movies of using the computer back in the 90s

Nowadays if something isn't a bloated pile of trash, it'll literally load up in a few dozen milliseconds or less. Back then, even a pretty lightweight text-only site would take seconds to load and render (and of course, bloated crap sites back then took upwards of a minute to load if you left images on)

This was a killer feature in the iCab browser! I loved that ambitious little browser and used it for many years, and its ability to easily toggle image loading was one of the reasons.

I browse that way today. Images, CSS and javascript disabled by default and whitelisted on a case-by-case basis with uMatrix. 90% of the time this makes websites better and I don't end up whitelisting anything. Most of the images paired with articles online are irrelevant stock photos that are only added to articles because the illiterate half of the population will close the page immediately if there isn't a picture to look at.

When I was a kid we had 28.8 for a couple years then 56k a couple years later. I remember frequently leaving the room and coming back to check and see if the page loaded. I convinced my parents that if we got DSL I would spend less time online because I wouldn't have to wait for websites to load. Hahaha

Same here. I remember when I used to think twice before clicking a link and loading a page. It would take seconds to load most pages, so loading things unnecessarily was a huge waste of time. Now people don’t think twice about opening a bunch of links from search results all at the same time, etc.

I also remember loading being so slow that I could sit there watching an imagine file load a few rows of pixels at a time. And when downloading, I had to worry about tying up the phone line for x amount of time, even for things that were just a few MB. So yeah, it was definitely much slower “back in the day.”

Bandwidth has improved, i.e., internet speeds have improved. But the internet is not the web.

The amount of data websites try to make users transfer, e.g., through browsers that auto-load resources and run Javascript, has also increased. The number of websites using "simple HTML" has decreased, even though it makes the web faster. As such, for the web user, the speed of the web (cf. internet speed) has not improved. At best it has only stayed the same.

Thanks to increased internet speeds more data can be transferred in less time. But if the amount of data is increased instead of being held constant, e.g., simple HTML is no longer "good enough", then over time the user may not notice any speed improvement when using the web. The amount of data being transferred over the web today attributable to marketing, advertising, tracking and telemetry, and the number of DNS lookups to support those connections, has increased substantially.

When "tech" companies purport to work to "make the web faster" their strategy is never to reduce the practices that make the web slower, like advertising. In some cases they are working to allow more such traffic, without affecting speed too much so as to alert the user. Or to allow routing website traffic through their own servers, e.g., AMP.

Transferring the data required for 1990s websites over today's internet would make the 1990s web noticeably faster. Unfortunately, today's websites and "ad tech" are substantially more resource hungry, mainly for the benefit of generating revenue for "tech" company intermediaries. The user foots the bill for the increased resource usage.

The single biggest improvement for me was tabbed browsing, even on a slow modem that let you open one page while reading another.

You don't read very fast anyway.

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